Last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a press release blaming AFLC Co-Founder and Senior Counsel David Yerushalmi for the Republican Party’s decision to adopt a platform plank that supports the American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) model legislation authored by Yerushalmi.
Naturally, CAIR used this opportunity to attack Yerushalmi and label him, among other things, “an infamous Islamophobe with a history of bigoted statements…”  CAIR stated, “Outside of his anti-Islam activism Yerushalmi is notable for saying, ‘There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.’ He has also claimed that people of the Jewish faith ‘destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite.'” CAIR also released an “Islamophobe profile” of Yerushalmi, which according to their press release, is “the first in a series of such reports.”
It is clear that for CAIR (an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land terror financing case) to gain credibility in the American public square, it must perpetually engage in a mass distortion campaign (in ways even George Orwell could not imagine) to discredit groups and individuals like AFLC and Yerushalmi who expose CAIR and similar organizations for their deep ties to sharia-adherent Islam and violent jihad.
Still, it is important to fight the smears with truth, even though CAIR is simply playing to tune of the secular Left.
Indeed, Yerushalmi once wrote that the Founding Fathers limited the voting franchise in ways Americans now find repulsive. And, it is also true that Yerushalmi said they had a reason for doing so. But Yerushalmi most certainly did not say or even suggest it was a good reason; indeed, Yerushalmi offered one liberal view which is simply that they were bigoted misogynists, although Yerushalmi conceded that that explanation of just rank banality on the part of our Founding Fathers lacked any real substance for why brilliant political minds denied this most important franchise. In the end, Yerushalmi didn’t have an explanation. Apparently, however, just asking hard questions makes one a bigot and as the CAIR/Soros funded narrative goes, Yerushalmi was somehow arguing to revert to the pre-Civil War voting regime.
And, of course CAIR insists — on behalf of the Jews they so sincerely worry about — that Yerushalmi is also an anti-Semite. As to the Jewish parasite statement CAIR and the George Soros financed radical left blogs reference, the essay they point to is an essay on “Jew Hatred.” After mentioning in passing the rather uninteresting liberal Jew hatred, Yerushalmi was interested in discussing the conservative views expressed by those in the paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan camp (although it is unclear if Buchanan himself is hostile to Jews per se). In that essay, the portion that even comes close to mentioning the word “parasite” Yerushalmi was paraphrasing the old blue blood conservative hatred of Jews (made popular in this country by Henry Ford, a great supporter of Hitler and Nazi Germany). Yerushalmi wrote:
If you spend a fair amount of time reading on and off line the essays and scholarly works of conservative thinkers as I do, one thing stands out. The Jews.
The Jews it seems are the bane of Western society. I will ignore the Leftist version of the Jewish problem because liberals and their radical cousins necessarily must disguise their underlying contempt for Jews as hatred of Israel and of the nasty Zionists or of late as the hatred of the neo-conservatives, who, in just about everyone’s view, are not much more than Zionist agents manipulating the American government to do Israel’s bidding. But the liberals will never come out and speak of the Jews forthrightly because they have given up any pretense of defending any notion of discrimination. So, they necessarily direct their hatred at political euphemisms closely identified with apartheid, war mongering and the oppression of the poor defenseless Palestinians.
But the Jewish problem for conservatives is a different and quite interesting affair. It is most interesting because so much of what drives it is true and accurate. Now the high-brow among these men and women insist that they don’t hate Jews or wish them ill so in that sense the contempt is disguised much like that from the Left. The conservative variety simply professes to uncover the many and varied ways Jews destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite, especially when the host is a Western nation-state. But, the focus on this menacing and accursed people is only thinly disguised and one can well understand why. If the oldest of ancient people, and the one properly understood as the source of the theology of all of Western civilization, has become the single most destructive force in that civilization, a whole slew of raging dark forces might predictably be creating tectonic shifts below the visible surface otherwise projecting a serene, conservative, and even scholarly demeanor.
Clearly, what Yerushalmi wrote above was a critique of conservative Jew-hatred, and indeed the rest of the essay is an explanation of why conservatives of all stripes should be more self-critical about their own progressive bona fides. Thus, Yerushalmi wrote immediately following the above:
What are the main themes of the conservative “critique” of this ancient people? The primary one of course is that the Jews of the modern age are the most radical, aggressive and effective of the liberal Elite. Their goal is the goal of all “progressives”: a determined use of liberal principles to deconstruct the Western nation state in a “historical” march to the World State. The conservatives include in this rubric quite rightfully the neo-cons who, while far more bellicose than their fraternal Left, are no less dismissive of a Western political order based upon a dominant Christian people with a strong Biblical moral order.
A second cause of the conservative problem with the Jew is the Jewish identity with Zionists and the fact that these conservatives believe strongly that but for the Muslim-Jewish conflagration known as the Middle East problem or the Israeli-Palestinian problem the Muslim world might very well be willing to let bygones be bygones relative to their relations with the Christian West.
In response, one must admit readily that the radical liberal Jew is a fact of the West and a destructive one. Indeed, Jews in the main have turned their backs on the belief in G-d and His commandments as a book of laws for a particular and chosen people. These Jews, the overwhelming majority, have embraced modernity in its entirety. This means that they are wholly committed to the science-democracy reciprocal and this, per Descartes-Klein, Hobbes, Hegel-Kojève, leads to only one state of affairs: World Peace in the form of a World State.
But the conservative analysis of the Jewish problem fails in two essential ways. One, it has become a form of dark blindness. And two, if conservatives understood the Jewish problem well enough per the Loewenbergian critique they would understand that it is their problem as well. I intend this to be the briefest of essays and but a mere suggestion for future discussion so I won’t go much further here than to provide one example of each of these conservative analytical shortcomings.
The rest of the essay merely discusses the assault on Western national existence by progressives, a theme most conservatives are quite familiar with.
But, aside from the absurdity of a proud orthodox Jewish rabbi/lawyer married to a Jewess with two wonderful Jewish teenagers being a Jew hater, the quote that they, Mother Jones, Think Progress, and the rest of the Soros-funded blogs use to make this absurd point is merely the destruction of speech proper.
It must also be noted that Yerushalmi never proposed punishing Islam, Muslims, or Islamic ritual but rather adherence to a jihad-promoting sharia regime, effectively re-crafting existing sedition and seditious conspiracy statutes to be specific to the jihad threat. Moreover, Yerushalmi’s proposal had built into it the Brandenburg v. Ohio protections (even sharia that was not likely to produce imminent violence was not punishable).
CAIR’s press release also quoted a statement by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach when he introduced the ALAC provision to the Republican Party platform committee to link Yerushalmi and ALAC as anti-Muslim. Kobach said, “I’m not aware of any court that’s actually accepted the argument, but in cases involving either spousal abuse or assault or other crimes against persons, sometimes defenses are raised that are based in Sharia Law. We actually put a provision to this effect in Kansas statute this year and I think it’s important to say that foreign sources of law should not be used as part of common law decisions or statutory interpretation by judges in the lower state courts as well.”
Here, Kobach’s statement was either misquoted or not well-informed. If he wants an example of Sharia law inappropriately being incorporated as law in U.S. courts, there are certainly examples but none better than the case of a Muslim woman in Maryland which was affirmed by the Maryland appellate court, allowing her Pakistani husband to take custody of their child because he had a sharia judgment from a Pakistani Sharia Court granting him a divorce and custody because she was a female and because she would not travel from the U.S. to appear in a sharia court in Pakistan to defend herself against sharia-based adultery charges. In the sharia court, being found guilty would be subject to capital punishment. Hosain v. Malik, 108 Md. App. 284, 315 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 1996). In that case, the court’s adoption of the “bests interests of the child” was effectively whatever sharia says it is.
And, Kobach’s statement that foreign laws should never be applied in U.S. courts is similarly ill-informed. There are plenty of ways and contexts for such foreign law to be applied. The ALAC litmus test is simply when the application of the foreign law would violate constitutional liberties of one of the parties.